Unprecedented Donations

I continue to say, "Wow!", to Senator Obama's unprecedented amount of money raised during this campaign. Anyone that can rake in over $600,000,000 for a single campaign must be doing something right.
To anyone, that number is staggering, but to me the number of people donating to the campaign is even more mind-blowing! According to a recent article citing Sen. Obama's campaign contributions of $150 million just in the month of September, David Plouffe (Obama's campaign manager) contributed an email that said, "the campaign had added 632,000 new donors in September, for a total of 3.1 million contributors to the campaign."
WHAT?! 3.1 million contributors in this campaign alone? In my meager knowledge of the history of our country, that number of donors to a single, presidential campaign is impressively unprecedented and impressive.
I love figuring out the percentages of people that constitute a group. For example, I just was watching the wacky network called FoxNews and the anchor cited how many viewers they have watch their broadcasts: "over a million viewers", she said. That means that one-third of 1% of the American population watches the outwardly conservative network called FoxNews. So what percentage of the American population has donated to Obama's campaign? If I do my math right with the US's population being about 300 million people, about 1% of the entire country has financially invested in the "Obama movement".
I make the comparison to FoxNews not to bash the network or say that we should stay away from the network. I, personally, watch the channel every once in a while to gather information from the more conservative opinion-slanted news anchors. We must be constantly looking at all sides of the issue before professing that our opinion is the best.
In short, Obama has a lot of money. Yes, his $600 million in campaign donations seems excessive; however, when you realize that 3.1 million people have donated to his campaign, tha makes the average donation to be a roughly $200.
To finish, I will make a comparison to the sources that Senator McCain gets his campaign money. According to another article from the International Herald Tribune, "But an examination by The New York Times of a list of 106 elite fund-raisers who have brought in more than $100,000 each for McCain found that about a sixth of his money collectors are lobbyists." That's roughly 17% of all his donations that have come from lobbyists. Could this be why his message has stayed with "Drill Baby Drill" and "Win the War"? He might have a few people "in his back pocket paying him to say a few things that makes their own pocketbooks considerably thicker.
In conclusion, money is a big deal in a campaign. Obama has a heck of a lot of it from a heck of a lot of average, wealthy, and even poor Americans wishing to be a part of history in the making.